RightNow helping clients get social

RightNow Technologies has joined the growing field of CRM providers offering social network monitoring to clients.

Cloud Monitor, part of RightNow's latest service suite upgrade, tracks consumer comments on Twitter and YouTube and feeds these data into the user company's CRM system. RightNow's SmartSense tool is being used to help Cloud Monitor identify the emotions embedded in social media content — meaning negative comments can be marked as such and prioritized for responses.

Although Cloud Monitor only measures YouTube and Twitter so far, future integrations with Facebook and MySpace are planned. Salesforce.com offers a similar social network integration on its Service Cloud, which is focused on Twitter and Facebook.

For RightNow client iRobot, Cloud Monitor offers a welcome upgrade from its current manual process of sifting through social media sites.

“Mining social media plays a big role in our strategy,” said Bill Bobrowski, manager of NA customer support, iRobot. “Our call centers regularly go out and pull this information in for us and make that a touchpoint for the customer, so if we find someone that is having a problem, we can contact that customer and make it right. It's a big deal because just one negative point can spread like wildfire — you really have to rein it in.”

He added that delving into social media will probably help iRobot communicate more with its young, techie customers and get a better view of its customers in general. Customer service and retention are a huge focus in iRobot's overall business strategy, as it, like many other companies, fights through the down economy.

“We're in a huge campaign to save our customers, especially the ones that are going out of warranty because in tough economic times they may not want to buy that new battery or new wheel,” Bobrowski said. “We're trying anything we possibly can to keep them as customers and keep them in-brand.”